King Solomon stood before God and prayed at the dedication of the Temple. "Master of the Universe," he said, "let everything else be set aside and focus on my prayer and supplication" (1 Kings 8:28). It sounds audacious. But the rabbis read it as the proper posture for a king who knows his limitations. Solomon is not commanding God. He is asking God to pay attention — which implies that God has other things to attend to, which implies that Solomon grasps the scale of what he's asking.
Aggadat Bereshit then moves to the angels — the ones who guard and judge the world. Every nation has a guardian angel in the heavenly court, and those angels argue the cases of their charges. This is the cosmic machinery behind the rise and fall of empires: not random history, not pure human agency, but a heavenly court where advocates argue and verdicts descend. David's psalm cuts through all of it: "Let my sentence come forth from Thy presence" (Psalm 17:2). Not from the angels. From God directly. David wants no intermediary.
The prayer that bypasses the cosmic machinery — that goes straight to the throne — is the prayer that gets answered fastest. The rabbis taught that Israel, uniquely, could speak to God without an advocate. Every nation needed its angel to carry its case. Israel could walk in through the front door. That was the whole point of the covenant.